Board denies parole for newspaper boy's killer

Robert Lower, the man who kidnapped, raped and killed Rockford newspaper boy Joey Didier in 1975, will stay behind bars.

Aaron Chambers

Robert Lower, the man who kidnapped, raped and killed Rockford newspaper boy Joey Didier in 1975, will stay behind bars.

The Illinois Prisoner Review Board voted 11-0 today to deny Lower’s request for parole. Lower has served 32 years in prison, and has been denied parole 17 times.

He never has received a vote from any board member in favor of his parole. He will be eligible for parole again in three years.

The board voted after Milton Maxwell, a board member, described his recent meeting with Lower at the Big Muddy Correctional Center in southern Illinois, where Lower is serving 100 to 150 years for his crime.

Maxwell told his colleagues he saw “no redeeming qualities” upon which he could base a recommendation for parole. He added that community protest against Lower’s request for parole was “enormous.”

During his meeting with Maxwell, Lower said he regretted taking Didier’s life.

“I was an individual who was messed up, screwed up, whatever you want to call it,” he said.

Lower, 69, was calm and composed during that meeting, answering all of Maxwell’s questions with brief and deliberate responses. But he appeared confused about some of the points of his own life — saying, for instance, that he could not remember the name of the woman he was married to for three months.

Moreover, Lower did little to explore or support the psychological transformation he claimed to have completed, despite Maxwell’s repeated probing. Lower said he has been in sex-offender counseling for 14 years, but that he had not recently been psychologically evaluated.

“I’m not that same person anymore,” Lower said. “Back then, I was a cold-hearted, no-good person.”

He added, “I didn’t have any regard for anybody, anybody’s well-being.”

Lower abducted Didier on the morning of March 4, 1975. He told police he couldn’t sleep, so he got dressed and went “driving around looking for a paperboy.”

He found Didier, 15, delivering newspapers on Fulton Avenue in Rockford. He coaxed the boy into his car, drove him to a remote cabin in Jo Daviess County and sexually assaulted him.

He then put a noose around the boy’s neck, tossed the rope over a rafter, and as the boy pleaded for his life, hanged him.

“At the beginning, I didn’t plan on killing him,” Lower told Maxwell. “I planned on having sex with him.”

Maxwell asked Lower why he opted to kill the boy.

“If I got rid of him, there wouldn’t be nobody to testify,” Lower responded, adding that his thinking at the time was “screwed up.”

Maxwell asked Lower what would have happened if he had gotten away with his crime, and Lower responded: “It probably would have continued.”

Staff writer Aaron Chambers can be reached at 217-782-2959 or achambers@rrstar.com.